Around 2020, cardboard rectangles printed with cartoon animals began to be treated similarly to derivatives on Wall Street. Safes were being used to lock up booster boxes. Behind display cases, graded slabs resembled artifacts from museums. In Japan, a single Lillie Full Art card, drawn by Naoki Saito and featuring a soft-voiced anime character, was trading for as much as $65,000. At the time, it appeared to be either totally insane or visionary. Most likely both.
The current price of that same card is less than $15,000. which is still a substantial sum of money for a piece of cardboard, to be fair. However, the direction of travel conveys a lot.
Unlike some movie markets, the Pokémon card market did not plummet. A single moment of reckoning did not exist. The speculative layer, which sits on top of actual collector interest and game popularity, has been subtly disintegrating. Card shops in Japan are closing without warning. The lines outside stores on the day of release have gotten shorter every day. Rare cards that used to cost $300 or more are now found in $30 bins, and kids are actually purchasing them once more. That final detail has an almost poetic quality.
It is helpful to look back at what really caused prices to rise in order to comprehend how we got here. The Pokémon Company was flooding retail shelves with ancillary products, such as tins, elite trainer boxes, and premium collections, while printing booster boxes at comparatively limited quantities. This satisfied casual demand while maintaining the core product’s scarcity to make it feel unique. Millennials, who grew up trading these cards on school playgrounds in the late 1990s, were reaching their peak earning years at the same time that Pokémon was being recognized as an investable asset. This was a generational confluence that few people could fully account for. It is rare for that alignment to occur, and it fueled an already hot market.
The grading ecosystem then became involved. Businesses such as PSA started rating cards on a scale of 1 to 10 and putting them in official certified hard plastic slabs. A PSA 10 “Gem Mint” card could fetch ten or twenty times the price of its ungraded counterpart. What came next was more akin to a financial product than collecting.
Companies started purchasing raw cards in large quantities, not to collect them, but to grade them and repackage them into mystery boxes and rip-and-ship livestreams, which are nostalgic gambling-style products. According to some industry insiders, over half of all grading volume is currently accounted for by this type of operation. If that’s accurate, pop reports — the data tracking how many graded copies of a card exist — are essentially meaningless as indicators of true scarcity.
The collapse, when it came, followed a familiar script. Speculative buyers began pulling out of the market after entering it in search of appreciation. The supply flooded out of their exits. Counterfeits, growing increasingly convincing, added another layer of uncertainty. The delusion of scarcity that had supported prices began to resemble a confidence trick that everyone had agreed to take part in rather than market fundamentals. Although the precise moment of the tipping point is still unknown, the direction has been steady for several months.
It’s easy to say that what’s left is healthier if you didn’t purchase a $65,000 card. The organic layer of the market remains: players who need cards for competitive tournaments, collectors chasing childhood memories, artists and enthusiasts who genuinely love the art. It is a real floor. The question is where prices settle once the speculative noise fully clears. With strong marketing momentum and an impending 30th anniversary, the Pokémon franchise itself is here to stay.
However, the rise and fall of Pokémon cards as an investment vehicle contains a lesson. When nostalgia, easy money, and influencer culture converge on a single product, things tend to go sideways in ways that seem obvious only afterward. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the children purchasing cards once more are the ones rejoicing at the moment, not the investors who believed they had discovered an advantage.
